Commit all scripts, diagrams, and documents to the repository for versioning and history.

Note that WSO2 can facilitate the following upon your request:

Arrange a third-party consultant to carry out penetration tests.

Reports and dashboards on the Production environment.

Managing remote access

WSO2 recommends you to do all Managed Cloud deployments in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). A VPC enables you to launch Amazon Web Services (AWS) into a virtual network that you define. A VPC improves the security of your data by providing network-level control and isolation for the AWS. You can keep your data and configurations in a private space and expose them through the DMZ. This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network, but with improved security and scalability.

To set up your Cloud environments, WSO2 requires access to your Amazon EC2 instances. We access these instances over SSH only, with a Bastion host working as the SSH gateway. The Bastian host can either reside in the VPC or in your own datacenter. The diagrams below depict both scenarios.

Bastian host in the VPC

The Bastion host is in the public subnet and allows SSH traffic only to the WSO2 network via a non-standard port. All other hosts are configured to accept SSH requests from the Bastion host only.

Bastian host in your datacenter

The Bastion host is in your datacenter, and the other hosts are configured to accept SSH requests from the Bastion host only. When WSO2 DevOps want to connect to the Bastion host via SSH, they do it remotely via a client console.

In addition to the AWS instances, WSO2 requires access to the following resources:

Implementing monitoring and alerting

WSO2 hosts all monitoring services in a separate subnet in the same VPC where your Cloud services are hosted. We configure Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) in all Linux hosts to monitor the resource utilization and set thresholds. If any resource gets utilized beyond a certain threshold, or if an application isn’t responding properly, NRPE triggers alerts and notifications.

We collect statistics about resource utilization (i.e., disk, CPU and memory utilization, JVM heap usage etc.) and application health. All statistics collected via the NRPE agents are presented using ICinga, the monitoring and dashboard tool. We also configure all Linux hosts with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and host the statistics that are collected via SNMP using Cacti, the the network graphing solution. All statistical dashboards are exposed only to the WSO2 network over HTTP/S. To communicate with the third-party services required to extend alerts, all monitoring hosts need to have Internet connectivity. However, this doesn't mean that the monitoring hosts are placed in the public subnet.

WSO2 requires an email server with SMTP Authentication enabled to send direct email alerts and notifications to other servers. If the customer cannot provide an email server, WSO2 uses Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). We need support from the customer to verify the domain and set up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), which is an email validation system designed to detect email spoofing.

We maintain application logs using the Logstash, ElasticSearch and Kibana solutions. WSO2 configures a Logstash agent in each host to collect application data and send over to ElasticSearch that is running on the monitoring host in a different subnet in the same VPC. The Kibana dashboard is exposed only to the WSO2 network over HTTP/S.

The monitoring and alerting implementation is depicted in the diagram below:

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If the customer wants to synchronize their monitoring with that of WSO2, DevOps teams from both sides need to agree on certain technical requirements such as additional agents that must be installed on hosts, how to expose dashboards to other networks, send alerts to additional email addresses, phones, etc.